With Michigan State's crushing defeat on Saturday to Wisconsin in the Big Ten championship football game, tensions are particularly high between the two states. It's almost as if any little thing could set a Michigander off — for example, a tourism campaign that likens Wisconsin to a deformed mitten.

That image (above, left) has become the centerpiece of Travel Wisconsin's website and Facebook page. Michigan is (justifiably) pissed off, as they have long compared their state to a mitten, and feel Wisconsin is just flagrantly stealing their mitten-shaped-state shtick! A website called Awesome Mitten first noticed and tweeted their outrage to their followers, and an all-out social media war has ensued.

Here then is just a sampling of the irate messages being left on Travel Wisconsin's Facebook fan page:

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"Elephant man lost his mittens... What naughty kittens!"

"Michigan is The Mitten and has been for YEARS. Not cool, guys. Not cool at all."

"First you steal our Rose Bowl, now this?"

"This is bull crap, Wisc. Find some other item that Wisconsin looks like and make it your own. Don't steal."

A spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Tourism says the mitten will stay until spring, at which point it will be replaced with some other deformed object that sort of looks like Wisconsin. (Last fall was a leaf, next ... a watering can?) She added, a touch dismissively if you ask us, "We're not the Mitten State. Michigan, they can own that. We want to be known as the Fun State." (What ever happened to the Cheese State? Hoping to lure in some of those lactose-intolerant dollars?)